Aaron Feuerstein, Mill Owner Who Refused to Leave, Dies at 95
Aaron Feuerstein, a Massachusetts industrialist who became a national hero in 1995 when he refused to lay off workers at his textile plant after a catastrophic fire, then spent hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild it, died on Thursday at a hospital in Boston. He was 95. Aeffia Feuerstein, his granddaughter and partial caretaker, said the cause was pneumonia.
Mr. Feuerstein’s company, Malden Mills, was by the mid-1990s among the last large textile companies in Massachusetts, which had seen its manufacturing employment numbers crater from 225,000 in the 1980s to about 25,000 a decade later. Most other companies, faced with competition from lower-wage states and cheap imports, had either closed or moved production out of the state.
Malden Mills, located just outside the old mill city of Lawrence, was a shining exception: Not only did Mr. Feuerstein refuse to move, but he and his company prospered, thanks to its proprietary fabric Polartec, which it sold to clothing brands like Patagonia and L.L. Bean. In fact, 1995 was a banner year for the company, with sales up 10 percent to more than $400 million. Then, on the night of Dec. 11, 1995, a boiler in one of the factory’s five hulking plants exploded. The shock wave knocked out the state-of-the-art sprinkler system Mr. Feuerstein had just installed, and 45-mile-an-hour winds blew the ensuing fire to three other buildings. The blaze burned for 16 hours, injuring more than 30 workers.
Three days later, most of the plant’s 1,400 workers lined up to receive their paychecks, figuring it might be their last from Malden Mills. Mr. Feuerstein joined them. He handed out holiday bonuses and then announced an even greater gift: He would immediately reopen as much of the plant as he could, replace the buildings he had lost and continue to pay the idled workers for a month — a promise he later extended twice. Working nonstop, he and his workers got the surviving building, the finishing plant, back in operation just one week later. Mr. Feuerstein bought an empty factory nearby to hold new equipment. By the first weeks of January, hundreds of his employees were back at work. And just 20 months later he opened a gleaming new $130 million complex.
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Mr. Feuerstein’s commitment to Lawrence and his employees was all the more noteworthy amid the painful waves of deindustrialization during the 1980s and ’90s, when private-equity buyouts and wage competition drained millions of jobs from high-income states like Massachusetts. “I feel that I am a symbol of the movement against downsizing and layoffs that will ultimately produce an answer,” he told The New York Times in 1996. “People see me as a turning of the tide.”
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But no good deed goes unpunished, and Mr. Feuerstein’s rebuilding efforts left Malden Mills saddled with debt, even as Polartec sales soared in the late 1990s. In 2001 the company went into bankruptcy; it emerged, two years later, with a restructuring plan that stripped Mr. Feuerstein of his management roles. His attempt to buy the company back was rejected by the new board, and he left in 2004.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/business/aaron-feuerstein-dead.html
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R.I.P Mr. Feuerstein.
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things.
He was genuinely a GOOD guy.
May you find happiness and peace in your new realm.
Rest well.
Put people ahead of profits. His employees loved him. I fear that folks of his stature are less and less common.
Who says the good die young?
RIP good sir.